Streeter: I want a swimmable Inner Harbor. I still don’t want to swim in it.

I want to be Tikia Ballard. I truly do. But I am not.

Because I’m not swimming in Baltimore’s harbor.

“I trust the science. I trust the data,” said the Woodlawn native and longtime science teacher as she adjusted her goggles, waterproof camera and cape around her bright blonde locs last Sunday. She was minutes from jumping off the pier at Fells Point’s Bond Street Wharf as part of the Waterfront Partnership’s Harbor Splash.

Ballard was one of 50 participants in what organizers envision as opportunities not just for fun dips in the water, but as a testament to the increasing health of the Inner Harbor. It’s also maybe a window to a future where Baltimoreans of every background have an accessible swimming spot. The scientific testing is there. The commitment from the environmental and water sports community is there.

“I feel like, ‘Let’s just do it,’” said Allison Blood, senior manager of environmental projects for the Waterfront Partnership. “If I live near a body of water, swimming is what I want to do.”

I understand that. But I will not be there.

At least not now. As someone who masks at work every day and will take any vaccine you’ve got, I certainly believe in science. I understand the amazing effort that made possible the scene before me: swimmers happily frolicking in the water in the shadow of the Domino Sugars sign.

This evidence, however, is weighed against 50 years of my avoiding touching that water like the plague — because I thought maybe it had the plague?

I’ve been turned off by both the stuff you could see, like trash and vomit (next to the drunks that vomited it), and by what you couldn’t, like the vans and bodies that are literally still being pulled out of the depths.

My Baltimorean sense of survival and skepticism, as well as the doubts of other environmentalists, gives me pause and makes me keep my clothes and shoes on.

It’s a particularly notable time for community communing with the harbor, as Friday kicks off Waterfront Week, a celebration of all things Baltimore and water, including Sunday’s inaugural Baltimore Harbor 1-Mile swim.

I told ultramarathoner, artist and Baltimore Open Water Swimmers founder Katie Pumphrey, who organized the event, that I was excited for her and her fellow athletes and happy the water might be healthy to swim in. But I would not be swimming with her.

“Why wouldn’t you?” Pumphrey asked me. Uh, because I was raised looking at stuff floating in that water between shifts at The Fudgery and imagine it touching my body like the monsters in “A Quiet Place”?

It isn’t lost on me that most of the participants I interviewed at the Harbor Splash event who grew up without that stigma weren’t from Baltimore. When I talked about the possibility of jumping in to several people I know who are from the city, their responses ranged from “What?” to “No way in hell.”

“Twenty years ago, you would never have thought people would be gathering to jump into the harbor,” said John Kellett, the man behind the Trash Wheel family and one of the reasons this is even possible, as his devices have been sweeping debris out of the water for more than a decade. Kellett, who took part in the first Harbor Splash in 2024, has “inadvertently come into contact with the water so many times and lived to tell the tale,” but he still gets why it seems “ridiculous, like, ‘Why would you do that?’”

It also didn’t escape my attention that almost every person queuing up to take a dip was white. Organizers acknowledge this is a stereotype of who traditionally belongs in certain activities, a skepticism about Black people’s safety, and the very real racial result of segregated pools and a society that would literally rather fill those holes with cement than let us swim in them.

Ray Scurr, president of the Canton Kayak Club, whose members were in the harbor monitoring the splash, said he’s done outreach to surrounding Black communities to attract them to the sport. “They don’t see any role models on the water,” he said. “I’d like to find people who are outdoorsy, willing to try, and then getting comfortable enough with it to bring friends. Having role models can change the perception.”

I think it might. Still, Blood’s comment about being drawn to swim in any body of water she lived near struck me, because that is a privilege that most kids who live in industrial cities don’t have. I paused for a moment, watching the glint of the sunlight on the pier, thinking about how Black kids, who drown at rates roughly three times more than their peers, deserve a body of water to jump into, too.

But, for me, it’s too early to consider bobbing in the harbor, or letting my kid do it. I asked my son if he would consider it.

“For how much?”

There you go. I love the idea of a swimmable harbor, but am not yet willing to commit myself physically to it.

Ballard is. I was so proud of her gutsiness and belief in her convictions as I watched her jump into the water, cape flaring in the breeze. In the movie about her bravery, I never thought I would be one of the townspeople in “Footloose” who didn’t want kids to dance.

But I’ve been here too long. And it’s gonna take more than Kevin Bacon shimmying or enthusiastic swimmers to get my toe, let alone my whole body, in the harbor.

Do a lap in my honor, lady. Because it’s not gonna be me.